[Sca-cooks] Cookware Fetish

[Mairi Ceilidh]

I blatantly stole this from my apprentice sister's Live Journal.  It obviously spoke to me, and probably will to not a few of you.  

Mairi Ceilidh


I have a thing for Calphalon One. The dark aluminum, the deadly serious matte finish, the simple, cream-colored, Zen-like cardboard packaging, the heft and the handle and the sex and the heat and the mystery. This, I think, is what God cooks with. Or rather, Shiva. I want them. I want them all.

Ah, but then my eye strays. I am weak. I cannot help but look. After all, All-Clad's MC2 line is positively orgasmic, too, all silky and urbane and it offers up its gorgeous brushed-aluminum siding and gleaming steel interior surfaces and world-class workmanship to your ravenous senses the way a Porsche offers up its liquid second gear, all honey smooth and passionate and as confident in its task as a high-priced hooker at a GOP convention.

And holy Jesus, All-Clad's LTD series, well, this line is simply God's gift to cookware, all sexy charcoal-colored anodized aluminum exterior wrapping like a perfect blanket around shining polished steel interiors and all honed to a lustrous pretentious dream by the fact that a goddamn 10-inch fry pan costs more than your mortgage payment.

See, this is my conundrum. I am finally at the stage in my life and ego and culinary adventures where I am ready to invest in a serious set of premium cookware, stuff that will last a lifetime and stuff that will make dinner guests coo and stuff that I will look at every single day and go, oh holy crap, just look at this pile of gorgeous kitchen junk I spent six hundred bucks on and which I coveted like a Bush daughter covets Coors Light. I really should be cooking more than pasta and salmon burgers and eggs.

Yes, I expect my cookware to shame me. Just a little. To whip me and humble me and tie me up in knots of culinary potential, make me feel just inferior enough to force me to want to earn its respect and allegiance and love by learning to cook one hell of a lot better than I do now. After that, of course, I will kick its ass.

All-Clad or Calphalon One? Stainless or hard-anodized? Untreated or nonstick? Premium or ultrapremium? I know I am not alone. This cookware fetish thing, it is a stage you must pass through at some point if you care at all about cooking and quality food and the deep joy of feeling a superbly made piece of cooking equipment in your hand, the perfect tool, the thing that brings bliss by way of pure usage, even if you only make macaroni and cheese. From a box. Badly.

Have you felt the balance of a perfect ax? A superbly made hammer? A perfectly weighted pen? A gorgeous Pyrex dildo? Then you know exactly what I mean.

The battle lines are drawn. All-Clad is currently the preening belle of the ball, the class favorite, everyone's hot little dream lover. Lord, you hold the LTD stockpot in your hands and you immediately want to buy it flowers and seduce it with wine and try to convince it to let you pour butter into its gleaming orifice, just for a second, hey I'll only stick in the asparagus just for a minute, OK, baby? Just to see how it feels, I swear, and then I'll pull it right out again, no really I promise, yeah baby that's it c'mon ...

But then again, it's sort of a fleeting thing, All-Clad, like a fabulous lost Vegas weekend with a squad of nubile cheerleaders and a whole bottle of MDMA because, sure it's all flash and gleam and perfect squeals of delight at first, but 10 minutes into the action it suddenly turns dark and flame stained and exasperatingly fingerprinted, tainted forevermore, the bloom off the rose and that virginal, fresh-from-the-box feeling vanishes like a flower's dream of sunshine in winter.

Meanwhile, the Calphalon One, it waits. It has the patience of a monk. There's something about this premium line, something dusky and mysterious and solid, resulting from the fact that it's 100-percent hard-anodized aluminum, all the way through, scratch proof and chip proof and metal-utensil proof, no gleam to polish, no false promise of eternal sparkle. It will never fingerprint. It will never wear out. Flames will only burnish it more handsomely, augmenting its natural hues.

C-One oozes that tactile iPod fetish desirability the way a Jesuit priest oozes calm sanctimony. You want to hold it and coddle it and whisper secrets to it and have it tell you lurid tales of perfectly grilled meats and slow-cooked stews and all the flawless chicken fond it can create for you if you treat it just right and promise with all your heart never to stick it in the dishwasher.

But the C-One, it has issues. Quirks. Many claim it is indiscriminately cruel to certain foods, its weird semi-non-stick surface simply spectacular for some fare but sticky and grabby and utterly infuriating with others, and unless you pay careful attention and use exactly the right amount of oil, it will backfire and frustrate and everything will stick, and you will stare at your pans like a jilted lover and secretly wonder what the All-Clad is doing right now and if it wouldn't mind a phone call.

It is, I realize, a religious decision, All-Clad versus Calphalon, one that will affect my beliefs about cooking and food prep for years to come. It requires deep focus, meditation, an opening of the third culinary eye.

This is when it hit me: I've been going at this all wrong.

I see how the high-end cookware sets, they beckon, they call out like sirens in the night, All-Clad and Calphalon locked in a deadly battle at the upper echelons of the premium cookware market while the runners-up, Anolon and Circulon and Farberware and the rest, battle for the scraps and the afterthoughts and the Wal-Marts, knowing in their resentful hearts that they really aren't all that far behind the big boys but they only cost half as much so no one takes them seriously.

But matched sets, they are a false god. They tease and wink and glitter but offer only bland dogma, sameness, sacred homogeneity. What was I thinking? Plentiful are the cooking gurus who say that you should, instead, mix and match pans of various materials and brands, make it all one big messy beautiful cooking family because, just as you wouldn't give yourself over to one dogmatic inflexible God at the expense of all the radiant others, so should you enjoy the pagan cookware route, which is to say, organic, messy, creative, mismatched but poetic, the right tool for the job. Praise Shiva, it is so true.

I have found my path. Get a little bit of each. Luxuriate in variety. Celebrate diversity. Let All-Clad and C-One intermingle and inbreed with Le Creuset, Anolon, a Circulon wok, iron. After all, as it is with your cookware, so it is with your worldview. Let there be light. Or rather, let there be simmer. You know?
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By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 26, 2005